Sen. Tom Coburn (Senate.gov)
Here's a fine example of how Republicans introduce a series of false choices into the national political agenda and then underfund the thing they previously held up as desperately important:
transportation funding.
In September, Sen. Tom Coburn held up passage of a short-term FAA and ground transportation reauthorization, objecting to the fact that states are required to spend a percentage of their federal transportation money on "enhancement," including bike paths and bike lanes, pedestrian bridges, wildflowers by the sides of highways, and more. These projects account for two percent of the federal transportation budget, and for that, Coburn was willing to shut down the FAA. To keep the FAA open, Senate leaders made a deal with Coburn to drop that requirement.
Coburn and other Republicans are setting this up as a choice between safe bridges and wasteful turtle crossing tunnels. In his fight to get funding for bike paths and turtle crossing tunnels (about which the Washington Post notes that "defenders ... say it saves motorists from deadly collisions that occurred when they swerved to miss the crossing turtles") eliminated, Coburn has all kinds of pieties about the need to dedicate that money to fixing bridges. And no question, there's a desperate need to invest in bridge repair.
But Coburn and other congressional Republicans aren't actually talking about passing the needed funding:
This disagreement is taking place on a much larger stage, as Congress faces a gargantuan gap between resources and needs. The immediate debate this fall is over how to shape long-term transportation funding that most likely will range between $45 billion and $54 billion a year.
But that discussion in haunted by repeated credible warnings that U.S. transportation systems — highways, the rail network, aviation, ports, mass transit — are worn out, outdated and need investment well in excess of a trillion dollars.
One study put the figure at between $134 billion and $262 billion a year, while another, released last week, said that postponing that investment could inflate the cost to $5 trillion by 2035.
Our Congress is not just prepared but determined to kick a growing problem down the road, claiming we can't afford to fix it now and thereby guaranteeing that a fix will get more and more expensive. When it comes to eliminating a small amount of funding to make it safer to ride a bike or plant wildflowers to reduce roadside erosion, bridge funding is an emergency. When it comes to actually funding bridges, not so much. And so we're sentenced to crumbling infrastructure and an economy devoid of the jobs that maintaining infrastructure would create.
